DMD backend quality (Was: Re: DIP 1031--Deprecate Brace-Style Struct Initializers--Community Review Round 1 Discussion)

[Mathias Lang]

On Thursday, 20 February 2020 at 13:11:21 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 20 February 2020 at 06:08:03 UTC, Seb wrote:
>>
>> "Funnily" we changed the defaults for dub (one can't build 
>> anything with optlink, no vibe.d, no phobos etc. anyhow) more 
>> than a year ago and people are fine with dub using LLD (like 
>> LDC) and thus being able to have more than 32k symbols in 
>> their entire program, getting a 64-bit binary by default and 
>> not being linked with an ancient, full of well-known and 
>> decade-old bugs custom-brew Digitalmars libc.
>
> Hello,
>
> Reading the discussion, it seems something undervalued is the 
> morale of contributors.
>
> Getting and _keeping_ contributors is of paramount importance 
> to open-source software. Some say that metric dwarf the 
> importance of _having users_, and is the only real health 
> metrics of a project.
>
> Please (D leadership) consider keeping contributors happy, even 
> if that means dropping a backend or OPTLINK or both. Projects 
> that nly person understand can be "unbabyfied" with 
> documentation/Wiki/years of contribution, but not having the 
> problem in the first place is much easier.

To be the devil's advocate, no one has contributed to D longer 
than Walter, and in the 20+ year he's been working on D, I'm sure 
he's seen countless contributors coming and going, many of them 
proposed ideas they considered improvements.

Everyone has a their own, often conflicting, vision of what is 
"the right way". We had many people saying "deprecate scope 
class" (myself included), we let it happen, and then one of the 
biggest commercial user steps in and said "Hey guys we're using 
this feature, like, a lot...". It surely makes you reflect on the 
silent majority. This is one example out of many where we went 
one way, and things didn't quite work out as expected.
As you cannot satisfy everyone, keeping people happy is not a 
reliable metric.

This is not to say that I think everything is going as it should. 
I do think that there is a lot to gain with dropping homegrown 
alternative to mainstream utilities (DM Make, optlink, DMD's 
backend...).
But we made immense progress over the years, as some very large 
projects have been tackled (conversion of DMD to D), and others 
have been approved but not yet championed (moving from Bugzilla 
to DMD).

Perhaps improving communication among core contributors could 
help with reaching agreement on such large project. From what 
I've seen, this is not a problem that is unique to D.